# Alternatives to Zabbix

Full-stack enterprise monitoring, free.

Zabbix ranks #7 of 9 in Infrastructure monitoring, with an Alt Score of 86. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0, free and available on Linux and Web. 9 of 10 checklist rows are verified against a public source.

Source: https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/zabbix/
Category: Infrastructure monitoring

## Overview

- **Who it's for**: IT and network administrators, DevOps teams, and MSPs who need to monitor servers, networks, cloud, applications, and services at enterprise scale.
- **What you get**: An open-source monitoring platform with metrics collection, real-time alerting, and customizable dashboards. It includes auto-discovery of network devices and hosts, template-based configuration for common systems, and flexible triggers for problem detection. Data can be gathered via agents, SNMP, IPMI, JMX, or custom scripts, with historical data storage for trend analysis.
- **How it works**: You deploy the Zabbix server (self-hosted or via Zabbix Cloud) and install agents or configure agentless polling on the hosts and devices you want to monitor. Zabbix collects metrics on a schedule, evaluates them against configurable triggers, and raises alerts or dashboard visualizations when thresholds are breached.

## Profile

- **License**: AGPL-3.0 (verified 2026-07-10)
- **Pricing model**: Free (verified 2026-07-10)
- **Starts at**: ?
- **Platforms**: Linux, Web
- **Status**: active (verified 2026-07-10)

## Ranked alternatives

| # | App | Alt Score | Licence | Platforms |
|---|-----|-----------|---------|-----------|
| 1 | [checkmk](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/checkmk.md) | 91 | GPL-2.0 | Linux, Web |
| 2 | [Netdata](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/netdata.md) | 91 | GPL-3.0 | Linux, Windows, macOS, Web |
| 3 | [New Relic](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/new-relic.md) | 91 | Proprietary | Web |
| 4 | [Datadog](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/datadog.md) | 86 | Proprietary | Web |
| 5 | [Grafana](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/grafana.md) | 86 | AGPL-3.0 | Linux, Web |
| 6 | [Icinga](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/icinga.md) | 86 | GPL-3.0 | Linux, Windows, Web |
| 7 | [Nagios](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/nagios.md) | 82 | GPL-2.0 | Linux, Web |
| 8 | [Prometheus](https://altcatalog.com/alternatives/prometheus.md) | 78 | Apache-2.0 | Linux, Web |

Alt Score = Verified coverage (90%) + Visibility (10%). See https://altcatalog.com/how-alt-score-works/

## Feature comparison

Legend: Yes / No / Partial / ? (not verified).

| Infrastructure monitoring checklist | Zabbix | checkmk | Netdata | New Relic | Datadog | Grafana |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free | Freemium | OSS + paid hosting | Usage-based | Usage-based | Freemium |
| Starts at | ? | €190/month (billed annually, Checkmk Pro edition) | $4.50/node/month | $0.40/GB ingested | $15 per host/month | $19/month |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-2.0 | GPL-3.0 | Proprietary | Proprietary | AGPL-3.0 |
| Platforms | Linux, Web | Linux, Web | Linux, Windows, macOS, Web | Web | Web | Linux, Web |
| Metrics collection | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Dashboards | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Alerting rules | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Log aggregation | Partial | Partial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Tracing / APM | ? | Partial | No | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Self-hostable | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Agent footprint | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations count | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier limits | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| High-availability setup | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | Yes |

## Sources

Sources for Zabbix. Each alternative is sourced on its own page.

- **Pricing model**: Free — <https://www.zabbix.com/subscriptions> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Zabbix open source software has no license fee”
- **License**: AGPL-3.0 — <https://github.com/zabbix/zabbix/blob/master/README.md> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Zabbix is distributed under AGPL-3.0-only”
- **Platforms**: Linux, Web — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/installation/requirements> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Due to security requirements and the mission-critical nature of the monitoring server, UNIX is the only operating system that can consistently deliver the necessary performance, fault tolerance, and r”
- **Status**: active — <https://github.com/zabbix/zabbix/tags> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “7.4.12”
- **Metrics collection**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/introduction/about> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Zabbix is a software that monitors numerous parameters of a network and the health and integrity of servers, virtual machines, applications, services, databases, websites, the cloud and more.”
- **Dashboards**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/web_interface/frontend_sections/dashboards> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “The Dashboards section is designed to display summaries of all the important information in a dashboard.”
- **Alerting rules**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/config/notifications/action> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “If you want some operations taking place as a result of events (for example, notifications sent), you need to configure actions.”
- **Log aggregation**: Partial — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/config/items/itemtypes/zabbix_agent/log_items> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “These two item keys allow to monitor logs and filter log entries by the content regexp, if present.”
- **Self-hostable**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/introduction/about> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Zabbix is free of cost. Zabbix is written and distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license. It means that its source code is freely distributed and available for the general public.”
- **Agent footprint**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/introduction/overview> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “the Zabbix agent (lightweight, supported on many platforms, written in C)”
- **Integrations count**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/config/templates_out_of_the_box> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “Zabbix provides a growing set of pre-configured templates to simplify and speed up the setup of monitoring targets.”
- **Free tier limits**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/subscriptions> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “free to download, deploy, and use — with no license fees, no device limits, and no feature gates.”
- **High-availability setup**: Yes — <https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/current/en/manual/concepts/server/ha> (verified 2026-07-10)
  - Quote: “In the Zabbix high availability mode multiple Zabbix servers are run as nodes in a cluster. While one Zabbix server in the cluster is active, others are on standby, ready to take over if necessary.”

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Ranked by verified data, never by who paid. https://altcatalog.com/trust/